Something Beautiful Is Going to Happen
The vacation spot outside Vaasa devoured the four Lund girls. With their tiny bones and their tanned skin, an entire era disappeared. Six kilometers of winding coastline, a popular bathing resort in the fifties. Rows of changing cabins, tall reeds rustling in the wind. Here one finds the era the conservatives long for: when parents could send their children to the beach unsupervised, two dollars for ice cream and a bus ticket in the pockets of their summer trousers.
Mom and Dad shook their heads in concern and concealed the news about the children in Messina, Graad, Gottwald, where, it seemed to them, every week the tiny skeleton of a child was found cast into a replacement wall. Regularly, someone’s daughter who had been kept captive in a basement there for thirty years would flee into the street and scream for help.
But not here. Here there is social democracy. And the delicate peach blossoms of social democracy, its gentle aid programs, these progressive things make the broken soul of a person flare up with a kind of hope. This fantasy land will remain forever untouched by that strange technical urge to build a secret underground room, one with a ventilation system whose vents are disguised in the lawn as miniature clay windmills.
These dark fever clouds of the mind cool in the clear mists of open air; the breath of the distant blue glaciers freezes the sick thoughts of a person. Vaasa. One would much rather live here. And then, on a Tuesday morning, clouds beneath a blue sky, the four sisters went swimming.
The computer role-playing game Disco Elysium, released in 2019 by the Estonian studio ZA/UM, takes place in a world that is raw, merciless, and devoid of any sign of empathy. In an era of political upheaval, in which the survivors of a ruthless war still have to wipe the blood from their faces, everyone searches for the remnants of happiness—whether in one of the great metropolises or far away from the depressive bustle.
Harrier Du Bois, a detective of the 41st precinct of the Revachol Citizens Militia, called simply Harry by his few friends and many enemies, wakes one morning in a run-down seaside hotel with no memory of his past or of the world around him. He and his temporary partner from the 57th precinct, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, have been called to the once idyllic coastal town of Martinaise to investigate the brutal murder of a loudmouthed soldier.
The decaying world of Disco Elysium is full of interesting stories, viewpoints, and characters. From the first minute, the game is like a talkative book that wants to devour you and take your breath away with its never-ending chronicles. Wherever you lead Harry—through the enchanted church, the small supermarket, or the desolate swamp—with every step the history of a place collapses over you, a place that shouldn’t even exist like this… or perhaps it should?
Disco Elysium thrives on its enormous freedom of choice and the not-to-be-underestimated weight of chance. This begins even before Harry opens his eyes for the first time and continues all the way to the bitter end—when you only then realize the path you have taken, without having had any sense of what you may have missed. But by then it is already too late.
Harry’s limited time in Martinaise is essentially a search for himself disguised as a detective adventure. Do you want to confront the town’s inhabitants as a permanently drunk Nazi? As an all-knowing philosopher? As an unabashed muscleman? As an authoritarian logician? Or rather as a likable charmer? The possibilities in Disco Elysium seem almost limitless.
Anyone who immerses themselves in the world of Disco Elysium must renounce every distraction; they must become one with every single polygon that transforms into a living painting on the screen; they must become Harrier Du Bois. Or rather: Harrier Du Bois must become you.
Disco Elysium is an experience that likely does not exist a second time in this form or with this intensity. Martinaise may cover only a fraction of what the rest of the world—lingering in a fog that continuously approaches you—has to offer, but one can sense the immense drama hidden all around. And with every conversation, every question, every new idea, you come a little closer to this epic—without ever being able to grasp it fully. For the greater whole, one simply is not ready yet—and probably never will be.